Week 11 is rolling with some great games on this third Sunday in November. As we’ve been doing all season, we’ll publish the takeaways Sunday and update them live through Monday morning. So come back again if not all 10 are here yet …
Pittsburgh Steelers
I said it last week and I’ll say it again—this Pittsburgh Steelers team has a knack. For the second consecutive week, Mike Tomlin’s crew was in a street fight. For the second consecutive week, when it mattered most and gloves were dropped, it was Pittsburgh swinging just a little harder.
Last week, it was Minkah Fitzpatrick and Damontae Kazee stoning Zach Ertz inches short of the sticks on fourth down to close out the Washington Commanders. This week, it was a crew of players along the Pittsburgh front winning their one-on-ones, and having a pretty good idea of what might be coming, in stopping a late two-point conversion attempt by the Baltimore Ravens that would have tied it.
There were razor-thin margins in both games. The Steelers took them, as they see it, mostly because they have a bunch of guys fighting for them with a boatload of experience.
“We were just calm throughout, with the rollercoaster,” 14-year vet Cam Heyward told me. “You just learn to stay even keel. No matter if it was good or bad, you got to weather the storm, rally around each other—and understand we can still make a play. Going into that drive, we knew they were going to have to go for a two-point conversion. They scored a little quicker than we would have liked. But we felt confident in our group getting it done.”
And, as Heyward said, that confidence wasn’t shaken, even after the presumptive favorite for NFL MVP, Lamar Jackson, led the Ravens on a nine-play, 69-yard drive that ended in a 16-yard touchdown strike to Zay Flowers at the 1:06 mark of the fourth quarter. There was, indeed, another down to play, and the Steelers were ready for it.
Or, at least, they were after getting a first look at what Baltimore had coming.
“We were in a nickel, and I think they were a little confused up front with what they wanted to do—they had gone to a tackle over formation,” Heyward says. “We called a timeout. They got out of it. We went to our ’Okie’ front, which is our base front. We could see they had a tight end on the ball, two receivers [alongside him]. We felt like there was going to be some type of rollout, some type of way. Just because it was a condensed formation [to our left].
“You start playing into that. We felt like it was going to be guided out that way.”
So at the snap, outside linebacker Nick Herbig burst inside receiver Nelson Agholor, and as Agholor flailed to block him, Herbig got in the way of two pulling linemen, who couldn’t get out to the edge fast enough to lead block for Jackson as a result. That left Jackson on the perimeter all alone with corner Joey Porter Jr., who held outside contain and rode Jackson to the sideline, forcing Jackson to throw the ball back to the field in desperation, hoping someone could do something with it. At that point, no one could, and that ended it.
“Nick did a pretty good job of holding it up. Joey Porter Jr falling over the top was great, and we stopped it,” Heyward says. “We were able to force them into a pretty dire situation.”
That, really, was a microcosm of how the game was played. In a rivalry game featuring two physical teams, one offense-heavy (Ravens) and the other defense-heavy (Steelers), it was defense that won the day. And from the very start.
On the second play from scrimmage, Herbig chased down Derrick Henry from behind and forced a fumble that gave the Steelers their first possession on the fringe of field goal range. The Steelers got two three-and-outs right after that, only allowing the Ravens their initial first down on the second-to-last play of the first quarter.
Of course, the plan was more complex than stop them. The key, as Pittsburgh saw it, was creating turnovers—the Steelers thought there’d be opportunities for those, and they came with Herbig’s punch out and rookie linebacker Payton Wilson’s spectacular, pivotal fourth-quarter interception—and keeping Jackson from creating with his legs, in both the run game and the pass game.
“I know we let some runs out, where he got [away],” Heyward says. “I thought we did a good job of having multiple guys, whether it was Minkah, Patrick Queen, get to the ball. There were moments where it was bend, don’t break, where we might surrender some yards, and having to deal with that monster in Derrick Henry was a big reason. But the thing that really stuck out more than anything was the turnovers.
“The turnovers were the key to the game and allowed us to control the game.”
And they gave the Steelers the margin for error they needed to win the game when it mattered most, on the two-pointer and then the following possession, where Justin Fields came into the game to help chew up what was left of the clock in relief of Russell Wilson, who is now 4–0 as starter.
After the fourth of those wins, Heyward called Pittsburgh’s quarterback room “one of the top quarterback rooms” in the NFL.
Is that true? Maybe. Maybe not.
But it’s been good enough to get this team that really seems to know what it wants to be to 8–2, and good enough to vanquish a loaded rival in mid-November. Which means it’s fair to think it might just be good enough to accomplish a whole lot more for a franchise with the highest of standards, one that hasn’t won so much as a single playoff game in eight years.
“We’re very experienced. We’ve seen the highs. We’ve seen the lows. Everybody is better because of those,” Heyward says. “When we get into those tight situations, using Mike T’s words, we don’t blink. One thing that’s been working in our advantage, we have an offense that can sustain drives. I know they didn’t get touchdowns, but they moved the ball with success. Having a good defense that gets off the field, offense that stays on the field, when we create that, it allows us to stay fresh. It allows us to perform in the fourth."
No coincidence, then, that doing just that has become the Steelers’ specialty.
Green Bay Packers
The Green Bay Packers–Chicago Bears game, in some ways, came down to coaching. And on that, we can start at the end of the Packers’ nail-biting 20–19 win over their archrivals in Chicago.
The situation: Bears’ ball, three seconds left, ball spotted at the Packers’ 28, Chicago kicker Cairo Santos on for the game-winner, with Green Bay holding on to the aforementioned one-point lead. As zero-sum a spot as you’ll get on an NFL Sunday.
But the reality was, to paraphrase the great Sun Tzu, the battle on that snap was won before it was ever fought, and won by Packers special teams coach Rich Bisaccia in particular. The veteran kicking-game guru had his field goal team armed with information. The first piece was that Santos’s trajectory on longer kicks could be low. The second was that the Chicago field goal team was susceptible to getting caved in on the interior. The latter was confirmed on Santos’s previous two field goal attempts, good from 27 and 53 yards, and an extra point.
“We saw something where we could get a great push in the middle, and we saw other teams being able to do the same,” says safety Xavier McKinney—a new Packer, who’s playing at an All-Pro level on defense and is an edge rusher on the block team—when we spoke after the game. “[They] never really corrected it or got it fixed. And I think it was a great play call by Rich. Everybody did their job. The big guys were strong in the middle, they got a great push and got their hands up.”
Play it back, and you’ll see five defensive lineman pinching inside on the two guards and the center. Karl Brooks was the one who got a hand on Santos’s kick and, rightfully, was credited with the block. But Devonte Wyatt and T.J. Slaton were bursting through, too, combining with Brooks to make up over 900 pounds of force exploiting that hole Bisaccia found.
And so it goes for a Packers team that’s 7–3, still in the thick of a hyper-competitive NFC North race, and has shown itself to be thoroughly resourceful.
We’ve been over the Matt LaFleur piece of this. The work he’s done over the last half-decade—from managing Aaron Rodgers to developing Jordan Love to adapting his offense to whoever’s in there—doesn’t get nearly the notice it should. And it’s shown up again this year in how that side of the ball performed when Love was hurt, running the ball incredibly well even when everyone knew it was coming, with Malik Willis at quarterback.
All the same, LaFleur looks like he nailed his defensive coordinator hire, too, in luring Jeff Hafley from the head coaching job at Boston College. That also showed up Sunday in how the Packers adapted on the fly to a new play-caller, in Bears interim OC Thomas Brown, without much track record to go on.
“They did some things where they were a little different,” McKinney says. “They did some quarterback reads that we weren’t really expecting.”
Which, in the end, led to the defense doing just enough on the Bears’ two fourth-quarter possessions to stem the momentum Caleb Williams was starting to build in the third quarter.
“It was just trusting our technique, trusting our DC and him putting us in the right situation to go out there and make plays, him trusting us [with] whatever we see,” McKinney says. “Going out there and playing freely, it’s been the biggest key for all of us. And we just play as a unit and we show togetherness, and no matter the situation, we’re always able to overcome anything really. All that adversity, that’s on the others, not us.”
So where Sunday wasn’t exactly a teach-tape type of game for the Packers, they had just enough, both on the field and in the coaching box, to get past a desperate rival.
Of course, it’s definitely not the first time you could say that for a LaFleur-led team.
Nor will it be the last.
Seattle Seahawks
I don’t think you can undersell what the Seattle Seahawks did Sunday. Seattle hadn’t beaten the San Francisco 49ers in three years. Geno Smith was 0-fer against them since becoming the Seahawks’ starter in 2022. Starting linebacker Tyrel Dodson was cut before the team started its practice week. Starting center Connor Williams retired after the team’s first practice day of the week. The Seahawks hadn’t won a game in nearly a month.
But Smith swore to me Sunday night the one thing the Seahawks weren’t was shaken.
“We got the type of team and the type of guys on this team where no one doubts anything,” Smith told me. “No one is second-guessing anything or looking around trying to figure out what’s going on. The leadership on this team, we know what direction we’re going in. We don’t always get the perfect results. Sometimes it’s like that in this league. But no one here bats an eye.”
So Seattle’s 20–17 win at Levi’s Stadium, over the defending NFC champions, didn’t just pull the Seahawks into a three-way tie for second in the West, a game back of the Arizona Cardinals. It didn’t just get the Niner monkey of the team’s back.
It proved a point. And not really to any of us on the outside, but to those on the inside, who’ve bought into new coach Mike Macdonald’s program and got a week full of validation that it’s leading them, as a group, in the right direction.
That point may have been proved most emphatically, in fact, by what happened with the guys on the way out. Smith says he told Williams before the game that he respected his decision, and he loved him. Afterward, he texted Williams, This one’s for you. Meanwhile, by then, Smith had already communicated to Dodson how much he appreciated his work—and given him a big hug as he left the team facility.
And from there, it was about trying to position center Olu Oluwatimi and linebacker Tyrice Knight to have success in those guys’ spots, which happened Sunday.
“It’s a reflection of the leadership on this team,” Smith says. “Everyone completely bought in, buying into one another. It really shows when tough times happen.”
It showed up, for sure, at the end of Sunday’s game.
The Niners stymied Seattle on third-and-1, then fourth-and-1, in the game’s 55th minute, scoring a turnover on downs with 3:56 left and a 17–13 lead. Seattle needed a stop, and with enough time to come all the way back. The Niners, to make it tougher, gained two first downs, one by penalty, that ended up sapping two Seattle timeouts. By the time Smith and the offense got the ball back, it was on their own 20 with 2:38 left. Still …
“I knew we were going to win,” Smith says. “I think our entire sideline knew we were going to win. That’s what we do. Ball in our hands, end of the game, since I’ve been here, that’s what we do. We always find ways.”
The first way, for Smith, was through third-year slot Jaxon Smith-Njigba. “You talk about a true pro and an All-Pro receiver, I think that’s what he’s becoming,” Smith says. And the quarterback manifested all that by going to him twice on third down on Seattle’s final drive, then again in an even more important spot.
Seattle burned its last timeout with 39 seconds showing. On the next play, from the Niners’ 21, Smith saw the Niners showing a zero blitz, which prompted a check and throw underneath to Smith-Njigba, who picked up eight yards, hit the deck and got the ball to the official. The second call, in for that circumstance if the Seahawks had to go hurry-up, sent four of five eligible receivers into the end zone. Smith snapped it with 18 seconds left.
“I can’t hit my checkdown [because of the clock], so it turned into scramble mode and see who’s open in the end zone,” Smith says. “I saw the DB with his back turned. I actually thought I was running faster than I was. I watched the video—it looked like I was running pretty slow. It felt like I was running fast.”
The reality is he was going fast enough to win the game on a 13-yard rushing touchdown. When he saw the DB in man, with his back to the ball, Smith saw the pylon and figured he could make it, and eschew playing it safe and going out of bounds. He’d figured right, and Seattle is 5–5 as a result.
So the team that Smith said never had any doubt sure played like it in the biggest moments Sunday. And in doing so, Seattle wrapped up a weird week with a chance to move forward.
“The way that Mike prepares us, the way he coaches us throughout the week, the way he talks to us in the meeting room, he’s so forward,” Smith says. “We never want those things to happen with Tyrel and Connor, but you can only control what you can control. Mike’s message was perfect with that. We got the right type of guys and leadership on this team.”
That much was plainly evident when it counted on Sunday.
Indianapolis Colts vs. New York Jets
I have two quarterbacking takeaways from a wild one at the Meadowlands, and it was a slugfest spinning into a shootout with revivals from both signal-callers factoring in. We can start with the obvious. Anthony Richardson played his best football, and maybe the best football of his short NFL career when it was needed most in Sunday’s 28–27 Indianapolis Colts win over the New York Jets.
He got the ball back with 13:03 left after Aaron Rodgers and the Jets had marched 59 yards in six plays to take a 24–16 lead. The Colts had been outscored 24–3 since the waning moments of the first half. Things were bleak. And their embattled QB responded.
First, it was Richardson directing an eight-play, 80-yard drive with Shane Steichen leaning hard on the 22-year-old. The quarterback finished the drive 5-of-7 for 69 yards, completed chunk throws to Michael Pittman Jr. and Alec Pierce, and capped it with a dart over the middle to slot receiver Josh Downs coming out of the backfield—on the kind of easy-money underneath throw that the staff has been working him to look for.
Then, it was responding again after the Jets used up 7:30 of the clock, drove 53 yards, and extended the lead to 27–22 with a 35-yard field goal. On the second play of Indy’s next possession, Richardson pump-faked to Downs, getting the corner to bite, and dropped a dime down the sideline to Pierce for 39 yards. The play set up his next throw, which he ripped down the seam to Downs for another 17. That got the Colts to the Jets’ 10, and two plays later, Indy went student-body left and Richardson barreled in for the game-winning score.
Now, of course, the past few weeks were tough on Richardson. The key, though, was his reaction. As I heard it, the normally mild-mannered Floridian was pissed about the Colts’ decision. It lit a fire under him. He worked his tail off to be ready for whenever his next chance might come—knowing that Steichen’s decision was simply about playing the best player. And when Joe Flacco stumbled badly last week with three interceptions in a 30–20 loss to the Buffalo Bills, that created another opportunity, and Richardson was prepared to put together the kind of day he had in Jersey.
Bottom line: The Colts made the decision to bench him three weeks ago, needing to give the rest of the team the best chance to win, and hoping that Richardson would use the circumstance the right way. He did, and maybe, just maybe, it was a turning point in his young career (though they play the Detroit Lions next week, which might make that harder to see for the rest of us in the short-term).
As for the Jets, so much of their collapse has been pinned on Aaron Rodgers, and I definitely understand that. But there’s a whole lot more to it than just that.
To me, it goes back to the decision to fire Robert Saleh in the first place. The prevailing reaction to that from the locker room was, simply, How in the world does this help us now? Six weeks later, it looks like all those players were on to something—thinking the defense was the team’s strength, and doubting that axing the architect while spreading a really good coordinator thin would help.
That the defense couldn’t stop Richardson shouldn’t surprise anyone. Over the team’s first five games, under Saleh, the Jets were allowing 17 points and 255 yards per game. Those numbers, in the six games since Jeff Ulbrich became interim coach, have grown to 26.2 and 346, respectively, proof that this is about way more than Rodgers.
And the Jets being as bad as a franchise can be is, of course, part of what created the golden opportunity Richardson had Sunday. Again, good for him seizing it.
New Orleans Saints
Somehow the New Orleans Saints are still alive, and they have a quarterback with experience doing this kind of thing. Yes, Derek Carr has been here before, a few times.
He doesn’t want to relive 2014 or ’23. And the ’21 Las Vegas Raiders weren’t exactly the same. They were 3–2 when Jon Gruden was fired for nonfootball reasons. This year’s Saints were 2–7 when Dennis Allen was shown the door. But as was the case with Rich Bisaccia back then, the Saints have promoted a beloved special-teams coach, and gotten a very obvious injection of energy. As was the case with Bisaccia, the Saints’ entire roster is rallying behind interim head coach Darren Rizzi.
Last week, it gave New Orleans enough to edge out the Atlanta Falcons. This week, that added up to a 35–14 rout of a struggling Cleveland Browns team to pull New Orleans to within two games of first place in the NFC South, behind 6–5 Atlanta and the 5–5 Tampa Bay Buccaneers.
“I’ve been through this a couple times,” Carr told me Sunday. “When it goes well, the guy who comes in, no matter what was happening before, you just have to do something different. There has to be a different feeling. The building has to feel different. You have to put your spin on it.”
Rizzi’s spin? He rearranged lockers so position groups were clustered together. He switched up the schedule. He took the players out of pads that first week.
He gave everyone a fresh start.
“He really reminds me of that year I had with Rich,” Carr says. “Everything was going great before that one with Gru and all that. He came in, put his spin on it and made it feel different so guys could feel something different. That’s what Riz has done. He’s done a really good job of just grabbing the attention of everybody. Real player’s coach. Has our back on everything, the schedule. He listens to us. It’s been really impressive watching him work."
In turn, a veteran Saints team that never lost its confidence has turned it around.
And Sunday showed, again, that Rizzi’s way is by any means necessary.
The Saints got 138 yards rushing on seven carries—and three (!) touchdowns—from Taysom Hill, plus he added another 50 yards on eight catches. They got a 71-yard touchdown from Marquez Valdes-Scantling, who signed less than a month ago, and is suddenly an important piece with Rashid Shaheed and Chris Olave down. They survived what looked like a costly pick and a costly fumble, and won by three touchdowns.
Mostly, though, they’re just doing what they thought they would going into the season, what they were doing the first two weeks of the season, and what they thought they should be doing over the unsightly seven-game losing streak.
“Honestly, we have felt the whole time like we are a really good football team,” Carr says. “The feeling in the building never changed no matter what the week was. You never make excuses. The fact is we had a lot of injuries, a lot of guys out, a lot of guys playing new roles, a lot of stuff happening. We talked about it, D.A. talked about it. You have to weather the storm. We never lost sight that we felt like we were a good football team. We always believed that we were. We’re coming together now.
“D.A. even said this—with all the young guys that had to play for us early on, it’ll bode well for us down the stretch. A lot of guys have had experience, a lot of guys are playing well for us in certain spots. I wish I had a moment or something for you, but we really felt like we were a good team the whole time.”
And, remarkably, down just two games now in the division, they still have a shot to prove it, just like those Raiders teams Carr once led.
Jacksonville Jaguars
The Jacksonville Jaguars need a clean sweep. Yes, Sunday felt like a final straw sort of game day. The Lions didn’t just beat Jacksonville. They took their manhood. The final score was 52–6. The Jags were outgained 645 to 170, and had 10 first downs to Detroit’s 38. The 475-yard disparity in total offense was the most in an NFL game since 1979 (h/t to Pro Football Talk’s Michael David Smith for that stat). The Lions averaged 8.5 yards for each time they snapped the ball.
Jacksonville’s hitting its bye week at 2–9. Doug Pederson’s in his third year, and after starting his run as Jags coach at 2–6, then winning 15 of 20 (and 16 of 22 if you include the playoffs), he’s somehow pivoted right back into the hole he dug out of, with 14 losses in his past 17 games.
Clearly, it’s time for a change.
But that can’t just be Pederson. There were rumblings leading up to Sunday that GM Trent Baalke—who’s proven to be a survivor now with two teams—might not necessarily be resigned to the safe fate as the coach he helped hire in 2022. And if that’s the case, then much bigger questions should be asked of the folks who run that team.
Things may not be as toxic as they were under Urban Meyer in 2021, but they aren’t in a good place right now. As last year’s team finished 1–5 after an 8–3 start, rumors flew that Baalke wanted Pederson to make major staff changes, and that Pederson’s right-hand man, Press Taylor, was in the GM’s crosshairs. It’s been pretty well known since then that things aren’t, and haven’t been, great between the organization’s top two football officials.
If this were an isolated incident, that’d be one thing. But Baalke clashed with Jim Harbaugh in San Francisco, and pushed Harbaugh and many of his coaches out after a wildly successful four-year run, to install Jim Tomsula as his replacement. Seven years later, he re-emerged in Jacksonville, was promoted to GM after Doug Marrone and David Caldwell were fired, then kept on after the disastrous Meyer experiment blew up in everyone’s face.
So given that, and the existing discord between him and Pederson, it’d make no sense to go through another half measure of keeping on a GM and letting a coach go.
Now, to be fair, Jacksonville’s roster isn’t a total disaster. There are building blocks. Trevor Lawrence is one, even if he’s not blameless in his team’s listlessness. Josh Hines-Allen is another. But there are more guys on the roster, such as Tyson Campbell and Christian Kirk (and Cam Robinson before he was traded), that qualify as good players making great money, a dynamic that’s made the team wonky in its construction.
Which is just another reason why it’s time to bring in someone new, who can reset everything.
I think Bill Belichick will listen, given his relationship with Shad Khan’s son, Tony, as long as he can set it up the way he wants. I think some bright, young offensive coaches, like Lions OC Ben Johnson, could be lured by the chance to do for Lawrence what Sean McVay did for Matthew Stafford after Stafford was the victim of such mismanagement in Detroit. I think the Jags legitimately have a solid job to sell here.
But that’s only so if they reset in the front office, the same way they will on the coaching staff.
Because if you’re really looking for something new, then you wouldn’t risk having the same Baalke story told again.
Los Angeles Chargers
The Los Angeles Chargers already look like a Jim Harbaugh team. There are the broad-strokes ways to see it, in how they win up front; run the ball; play sound, smothering defense; and empower their quarterback not to have to win the game on his own—and just play football.
Then, there are moments where it comes out.
One happened just before J.K. Dobbins’s 29-yard, go-ahead touchdown in the fourth quarter of Sunday night’s 34–27 thriller of a win over the Cincinnati Bengals. When the call came in, Dobbins asked his running backs coach, Kiel McDonald, whether he should, if he got in the open field, try to score or just hit the deck, allow for the clock to run down and the field goal team to kick the game-winner at the buzzer. McDonald responded, Yeah, eff it—score. Center Bradley Bozeman gave Dobbins affirmation seconds later, saying, “Go. Score.”
Dobbins did, and in doing so effectively put an end to the Bengals’ furious comeback from a 27–6 deficit. It dropped Cincinnati to 4–7 and put a proud Bengals group on playoff life support. It also set the Chargers up, at 7–3, to pursue bigger things.
And, again, a big part of it is the identity the Chargers have built, one similar to Stanford, San Francisco and Michigan while Harbaugh was in those places.
Dobbins did hesitate to say that that vision has been realized fully in L.A.
“That’s hard,” he says. “I can’t answer that correctly right now because I think we’re still building. I don’t want to say we’re there, I don’t want to say we’ve arrived. That’s a hard one, but we’re getting there. We’re getting there, we keep getting better. And maybe we will get to that standard.”
They’re headed in the right direction, that’s for sure. And the cool part is that it’s expected now. Harbaugh picked guys he thought would fit what he wanted to build, rather than try to make other guys something they’re not, and the result is a team that knows what it wants to be, and what it’s becoming.
“Tough. Tough,” says Dobbins. “You gotta be tough to beat us. That’s our culture. We’re tough. We’re smart. And we’re relentless.”
And that’s why, Dobbins swears, there was no drama on the sideline, or even much concern, when the Bengals came back. Eventually, they trusted, the plan would play out.
“We were calm,” he says. “We knew we were gonna win the game. Nobody flinched, nobody was hijacked. Everybody knew. We had a job to do and we got it done.”
And based on Harbaugh’s history, we all have a good idea of what comes next.
Philadelphia Eagles
Nick Sirianni deserves a hat tip. The Philadelphia Eagles’ coach got beat up for yelling at the fans earlier in the year, the same way he got knocked around for his introductory press conference in 2021. He was shoved on the hot seat before the season, after three consecutive playoff appearances and a trip to the Super Bowl—which would be rare just about anywhere else, even with last year’s late-season collapse factored in. He had two franchise icons retire (Jason Kelce and Fletcher Cox). He has two new coordinators this year (Kellen Moore and Vic Fangio).
The Eagles are now 8–2, and Sirianni is 42–19 as their coach.
Maybe it’s time to get off his back.
Now, I get the climate in Philly. The roster is leveraged financially to win now. The team came excruciating close two years ago—completely controlling Super Bowl LVII in the early going—before falling short. The current core is stocked with stars in their primes.
On the flip side, being in that environment isn’t for everyone, especially with a team like the one Sirianni has now. And he’s hardly melted in the Delco pressure cooker.
In fact, when that pressure was most justified, and turned up to 100 outside the building, Sirianni was at his best. The Eagles stumbled from the gate, with their first two wins coming over the Packers on an ice rink of a field in Brazil and a Saints team that wasn’t as good as it looked at the time. Going into their Week 5 bye, they were coming off getting beaten down in Tampa, and had injuries all over the place. The new systems hadn’t taken. Jalen Hurts wasn’t playing great. The light at the end of the tunnel was dim.
So Sirianni challenged his players to reflect on the first month, both with their units and their position groups. He didn’t jam on the panic button, knowing that the Eagles didn’t play guys as much in preseason, per their normal plan of attack as an established, veteran team. He trusted Moore’s and Fangio’s well-worn schemes would take.
And the players followed him, no one more than Hurts. Hurts and Moore, I’m told, talked every day through the bye week. They went over more than two years of Hurts’s tape and bounced ideas off each other. They talked about leaning into the play-action game, given how Saquon Barkley was playing, and the receiver injuries they were dealing with.
All of it has worked. So have a lot of other things. A.J. Brown and DeVonta Smith have come back. Jordan Mailata’s healthy, too. Guys such as Cam Jurgens, Jalen Carter and Jordan Davis have grown into roles to help replace Kelce and Cox on the field. And leadership, through that adversity, showed up to make up for what was lost off the field. Fangio’s defense is humming, with rookies Quinyon Mitchell and Cooper DeJean killing it in the secondary.
I don’t know whether the Eagles can beat the Lions in the NFC playoffs. But I wouldn’t rule it out and, at the very least, they should get their chance to do it. Which is more than a lot of people expected six weeks ago, before 2–2 turned into 8–2.
And while no Eagles coach is ever truly safe from the guillotine that lurks on the airwaves in that city, people there could afford to give Sirianni a little credit for all of this.
Early look at the draft
Since the college season is winding down, I took a closer look this week into what kind of year this will be to have a high pick in the draft. I knew already that it wouldn’t be a good one to need a quarterback in the draft. What I ended up finding out is that there are a lot of positions trending that way, with the all-star games now just two months away and the combine a month after that.
Here’s some more detail after my digging …
• It’s simple at quarterback: Most of the guys who needed to play well this season haven’t. Georgia’s Carson Beck and Texas’s Quinn Ewers have flattened out. Ditto for Notre Dame’s Riley Leonard, who transferred from Duke. Colorado’s Shedeur Sanders is trending toward being the first one taken, but there are questions about his ceiling. Similar questions face Ole Miss’s Jaxson Dart. Miami’s Cam Ward has had a great year, but was barely seen as draftable before the season. Alabama’s Jalen Milroe is a monster athlete—but is he a good enough passer? So maybe someone will emerge, but the picture is murky now.
• There are big names at tackle, but the scouts’ assessments of them haven’t quite matched public perception. LSU’s Will Campbell has been accepted, outside of the league, as a slam-dunk first-round tackle, and I think the first part of that is fair. He will go in the first round. Whether the second part—that he’s a tackle—is correct is a matter of opinion. Some scouts believe he belongs at guard, because of his lack of length. Meanwhile, Texas’s Kelvin Banks Jr. had a really rough go against Georgia and has been up-and-down all year, and Ohio State’s Josh Simmons showed a ton of promise, but tore his patellar tendon and won’t be ready until the summer. So I don’t know that there’s a truly elite left tackle prospect in the class.
• The top defensive guys all have questions. Georgia edge Mykel Williams might have the best NFL-translatable traits of any player in the draft, but he’s been banged up. LSU linebacker Harold Perkins Jr., like Simmons, lost his season to a serious knee injury. Another Georgia defender, Jalon Walker, has flashed Micah Parson–type versatility to play on and off the ball, and is wildly athletic. Penn State edge Abdul Carter has that sort of skill set, too, having played off the ball the past two years, before moving to DE full-time this year. But for both, there are questions on how they’ll fit certain defenses in the pros.
• Maybe the cleanest prospect to look at will be Arizona WR Tetairoa McMillan, who’s been a monster. He had 90 catches, 1,400 yards and 10 TDs as a sophomore, and he’ll wind up in that neighborhood again this year. He’s big, athletic and consistent. His ability to separate at the next level is one question he’ll have to combat. If you take position value out of the equation, Boise State RB Ashton Jeanty may be as safe a take as McMillan.
• Then, there’s two-way player Travis Hunter, who’ll be the draft’s most interesting player. No one denies how remarkable it is what he’s doing. The question is what he’ll be in the NFL—it’s hard to imagine he’ll be able to carry close to the workload he’s had at Colorado. So then the question becomes whether he’ll be a corner or receiver, and whether he’s good enough at either, in a vacuum, to be a top-five pick. Obviously, Hunter’s going to go high. How high will likely ride on how teams answer those questions.
• I haven’t asked around enough on him yet, but I love Penn State TE Tyler Warren.
So that’s where we are, in a nutshell, if you’re in the process of giving up on your team’s season. Sorry I couldn’t paint a prettier picture of it, for you.
Quick-hitters
We’ve got quick hitters coming at you, with plenty to get to as Week 11 winds down. And we’ll start with the biggest game of the weekend …
• I couldn’t be more impressed with the totality of where the Bills are, at 9–2 heading into their bye. They could clinch the AFC East on Dec. 1 if a few things fall right. That’s remarkable, given how much leadership infrastructure they lost this offseason. We’ll have a lot more about them on the site Monday morning.
• It’s probably too late for the Miami Dolphins, but it’s abundantly clear watching them how tailor-made the offense they have is for Tua Tagovailoa, with so much based on the quarterback’s timing and accuracy. The offense looked broken with the other guys in there. It hums with Tagovailoa at the wheel, and that’s a credit to Mike McDaniel for building something that works for him and is specific to him. (Now can you find a backup who’s a little more like him?)
• Brock Bowers’s rookie season is flying under the radar because he plays for a Raiders team playing a bunch of games out of the national consciousness. But he’s been incredible. Through 10 games, he’s got 70 catches for 706 yards and three touchdowns. With seven games left, he’s just 370 yards shy of Mike Ditka’s yardage record for a rookie tight end, and 16 receptions short of Sam LaPorta’s catches record for a rookie tight end. He had 13 catches for 126 yards and a touchdown on Sunday alone.
• Puka Nacua is a monster, and was a massive difference maker for the Los Angeles Rams in their 28–22 win over the New England Patriots—which went well beyond his seven catches, his 123 yards and his touchdown catch. He brings a physical presence to the perimeter that wears on a defense, and can have an effect on the whole game. You never see the guy go down on first contact. He looks a lot like Anquan Boldin used to, in that way.
• The Patriots have a real one in Drake Maye. He showed it again Sunday on one particular rep, where a safety came free on a pressure and Maye stepped up, almost into him, and twisted himself around to throw across his body to DeMario “Pop” Douglas for a first down. I know the Rams were impressed with that, and a lot of other things, they saw from Maye on Sunday.
• Jameis Winston threw for another casual 395 yards, and it’s gotten harder and harder not to see these things and wonder why Deshaun Watson hasn’t been able to get out of his own way running that Browns offense.
• I apologize for not doing more on Bo Nix and promise we’ll do something in the Tuesday notes. He’s been outstanding, and was again on Sunday in completing 28-of-33 throws for 307 yards and four touchdowns in the Denver Broncos’ 38–6 win over the Falcons. He looks very much in control right now, and not in the least bit out of place.
• I love the Andrew Van Ginkel signing by the Minnesota Vikings—he had another two sacks Sunday against the Tennessee Titans. And maybe this only interests me, but I heard last week prepping for the TNF game that Philly liked him and Zack Baun in free agency, and Van Ginkel wound up being a touch too expensive. Baun’s been excellent for the Eagles, Van Ginkel’s reunion with Brian Flores is going great and Philly’s pro scouting department looks pretty good.
• How much of a difference did new Bears OC Thomas Brown make? Well, his voice was certainly different during the week—that his contrasted with ex-OC Shane Waldron’s so starkly is one reason why Waldron brought Brown with him to Chicago in the first place. And there’s no question the ball was coming out of Caleb Williams’s hand faster this week, which was a goal. Whether it’s sustainable remains to be seen.
• Geno Smith was pretty straightforward with me when I asked whether Nick Bosa’s absence had an impact on how Seattle played offense. “Without a doubt,” Smith said. “He’s such a great player, he always causes disruption.” In other words, not having to deal with that down the stretch certainly helped the Seahawks, and the tests that Bosa gets this week will be big ones, both for him and his team’s 2024 fortunes (and my Super Bowl pick).
This article was originally published on www.si.com as Week 11 NFL Takeaways: Steelers Winning on the Razor-Thin Margins.